BREAKING BAD: BUILDING A CASSANDRA PLATFORM

After a series of outages and with the prognosis not looking good, things needed to change! We knew we had to break bad and follow the paths not travelled before to take us into new ways of thinking.

Fulfilling our motto “Fighting downtime whilst focusing on data” required introducing new technology. However, introducing new technologies in large organizations is always challenging, even more so when it is a distributed platform in a financial institution. There are just so many details that require attention and it is especially challenging when many DevOps squads need them.

Our goal was to alleviate these teams as much as possible of such challenges by providing KaaS – Keyspace as a Service based on Cassandra distributed datastore. For us this meant the total package: from training to learning, from experimentation to production, from unpredictable to predictable.

In this talk, we will share our journey on how we created this developer’s journey to enable them to deliver their customer journeys. We will also talk about how we used existing products and tools within the organization to solve some of the challenges quickly and effectively. And how we designed the feedback loop between us and the many DevOps squads that use our platform.